


born a hot white diamond (burning through the rainbow)

by sevdrag (seventhe)



Series: if i were with you (i could say amen) [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Angels and Demons, Angst, Gen, Horror, M/M, Metaphysics, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Protective Crowley, Quote: You can stay at my place (Good Omens), Visions, it's not just like changing your shirt, it's wearing a suit of armor, nothing is easy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21776605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhe/pseuds/sevdrag
Summary: “Bother,” Aziraphale replies instead, and wipes a hand over his face. He can feel himself shuddering; there hadn’t been anything there, no, but it still feels like cold water trickling down his spine. That hadnotbeen pleasant.It’s all fine and good for them to have aplan,thanksvery much, Agnes,but the real trick of it is that they don’t — know how. Crowley’s only ever done a few possessions, far back before the birth of Christ, and Aziraphale himself hasn’t had to do much more than a sort of hovering-touch in a human’s brain to execute his miraculous assignments. And while their essences are, in fact, very much in tune with each other - after six thousand years, how could theynotbe? - the fact that they’re opposites, angel and demon, is causing a tetchy bit of difficulty.[you can stay at my place, if you like] [part 2 of 3] [a triptych of that night]
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: if i were with you (i could say amen) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1562800
Comments: 25
Kudos: 120





	born a hot white diamond (burning through the rainbow)

**Author's Note:**

> [Glass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeLNuQdfcQw) by Bat for Lashes is background listening for this piece. 
> 
> While I'm sure those familiar with this fandom would understand this piece alone, this is part two of a triptych, so I would encourage you to read the first to get a feel for where they really are -- and because I love comments and I would appreciate it.

_And with two suns, spinning_

_At two different speeds_

_Was born a hot white diamond_

_Burning through the rainbow_

_Flames fell into orbit_

_To hold eternally_

_Two heavenly spirits_

_That just wouldn’t seem_

_To be made of glass_

_When two suns are shining_

_The battle becomes blinding_

_To be made of glass_

_But we ride, tonight,_

_Tonight, tonight,_

_We ride_

———

_Crowley looks up, and he’s in the bookshop._

_Of course he’s in the bookshop. It’s night; the shop is dark, more shadowed than usual. There’s a small bit of light outside, but the shades are down. Crowley doesn’t need light to see, really, not in this corporation, but it’s a bit alarming to see night fallen in the shop as well as outside._

_That’s right. He’s looking for the angel._

_He turns, and sees some light coming from around the corner. Ah, must be him. It figures Aziraphale would be a light in the bookshop. It’s a bit on the nose, but Crowley won’t argue its accuracy._

_He turns the corner. There’s a candlestick in a holder, on the ground, inside Aziraphale’s ethereal circle. (Crowley still doesn’t know whether the angel thinks it’s a secret, or just appreciates that they don’t talk about it, but he’s been aware of the circle for centuries.) The light from the candle isn’t fiery-bright; it’s that cool blue light of Heaven, a single flame on the wick projecting a thin column of sparkling light through the bookshop dust and up through the ceiling._

_Yeah, Crowley thinks, that’s Aziraphale._

_He kneels down. The circle isn’t working; he feels only the magical potential of the lines and symbols, nothing holy here that could hurt him. Just to be safe, though, he puffs a breath of demonic energy out, towards the candle. Nothing happens except the flame idly flickers, wavering only slightly in the air before settling again, a beam of Heavenly light._

_Crowley slowly extends his hand over the edge of the circle. Nope, nothing here is live. (Aziraphale wouldn’t hurt him. Not here, in the bookshop.)_

_Emboldened, he shifts closer, and examines the candle for a second. It’s in one of those old-fashioned holders with the little handle on the side, so that you can carry your candle around in the dark of night and be dramatic over whatever shit you want to be dramatic about. Crowley reaches out and hooks his index finger into that little loop, intending to tug it closer—_

_—Hellfire sprouts, blooming over his hands, blossoming into a riot of heat-orange and red-fall, the pale moonlight of Heaven immediately winking out, and it_ hurts _like nothing he’s ever felt; he pulls his hand back, fingers blackened and weeping, and the Hellfire smolders itself over the candle and reaches for him—_

_———_

“That’ll be quite enough,” Aziraphale says, his voice soothing, and Crowley opens his eyes. 

They’re in his apartment, right. They’re on his couch: the comfortable couch he’s kept in the corner since the day he got the place, hoping and assuming that some day Aziraphale would be there to sit in it. He pulls his hands - out of Aziraphale’s - with a jerk, and looks down. Same pale hands, knobby knuckles, specks of freckle. Nothing burnt.

His heart is pounding as if his human corporation is having trouble breathing. Crowley uses a brief demonic miracle to make it shut the hell up. His hands are shaking too, and he fists them tightly to pretend that they’re not.

“That didn’t work,” and his voice is a _croak,_ dry and parched like he’d swallowed the Hellfire - bad idea even for a demon - and what the _fuck_ just happened.

“Oh, my dear,” says Aziraphale. “I can tell. Can you tell me what happened?”

“No,” Crowley replies instinctively, immediately amending it because it could be, in fact, relevant to their survival. “Was in the bookshop. Candle there, Holy light, figured it was you.” He pauses and takes a long fraught pull at the wine the angel hands him. “Burned me.”

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale whispers. 

Crowley puts the wine glass down, waggles his fingers. “But not really, angel. Still fine. Gotta try again.” It’s bold, and he’s pretty sure his hands are still shaking, but they really do need to figure this out.

He watches as Aziraphale leans back - huh, he’d been closer than Crowley had realized, probably out of concern - and wiggles himself into that stuffy upright set of angles. “Yes, let’s,” his angel says, and Crowley closes his eyes again.

———

_He’s in Crowley’s flat. Well, of course he’s in Crowley’s flat! They’re trying to—_

_—ohhh, he’s in Crowley’s_ flat.

_He’s standing in a doorway. The flat expands in front of him, to the left and to the right, Crowley’s odd little kitchen and the expansive room he knows they’re sitting in right now, but when he walks round the corner, there’s nothing there._

_Instead, there are a number of passages: two to the left, and one straight ahead. Aziraphale takes the one straight ahead, because that’s where he wants to go: wherever Crowley is._

_It doesn’t take long for Aziraphale to realize that Crowley’s flat has become something akin to one of those hedge mazes they’d so enjoyed in the late sixteenth century. It’s vaguely lit from above in a way that feels a little too much like Heaven, really, and all the walls are stark grey stone, the color of wet pavement. The walls tower above him, and Aziraphale really doesn’t like looking_ up _; it fills him with a sense of unease and vague nausea. Every now and then he passes a plant, or a statue he doesn’t want to look too closely at, but mostly it’s just the angles and turns of the maze. He hears—_

_Aziraphale whirls around to look behind him. There’s nothing he can see, but—_

_The path behind him is slowly being enveloped by shadow. It’s as if the sun is setting, except that he can somehow - see, sense, feel - that the oncoming shade is moving much more quickly. He whirls around, chooses a path, and puts a little haste into his step._

_The next time he turns around the darkness is much closer, and Aziraphale hurries his way through - he doesn’t really know where he’s going, and he didn’t know Crowley’s flat in the first place, so he doesn’t even really know what he should be doing here; oh, that won’t do at all, the shadow is nearly upon him, and Aziraphale ducks behind the next corner and flat-out jogs down the hallway, and yet—_

———

Aziraphale gasps himself back.

“Oh, _fuck,_ ” he can’t help but say, when he opens his eyes and sees Crowley’s dear face watching him, the set of his eyes already telling Aziraphale that they’ve failed yet again. 

His heart sinks, although Crowley gives him one of those terribly tiny smiles, just an upward quirk of his lips, and says, “Watch your language, angel.”

“Bother,” Aziraphale replies instead, and wipes a hand over his face. He can feel himself shuddering; there hadn’t been anything there, no, but it still feels like cold water trickling down his spine. That had _not_ been pleasant.

It’s all fine and good for them to have a _plan,_ thanks _very much, Agnes,_ but the real trick of it is that they don’t — know how. Crowley’s only ever done a few possessions, far back before the birth of Christ, and Aziraphale himself hasn’t had to do much more than a sort of hovering-touch in a human’s brain to execute his miraculous assignments. And while their essences are, in fact, very much in tune with each other - after six thousand years, how could they _not_ be? - the fact that they’re opposites, angel and demon, is causing a tetchy bit of difficulty.

Not that Aziraphale will ever mention it. Never again. Not after having seen an inkling of what it meant to Crowley, all this time.

“Right, what else can we try?” Crowley’s voice is still a bit thick, a bit dry. All Aziraphale wants to do is envelop his demon in his arms and hold him until this all goes away, but — but they must figure this out, this last prophecy, and resolve all of this petty nonsense with Heaven and Hell so that they can have the space to sort out their _own_ relationship.

“I was in your — flat, dear,” Aziraphale tells him, waving a hand around. “But it was like - oh, those hedge mazes at Marseille, remember - and something was… following.” He shudders. “A bit not good.”

“A bit,” Crowley drawls, and he tries another of those small smiles. Aziraphale’s spirits lift, despite the overall situation. Seeing Crowley here, trying to solve this, trying to hope: the both of them, they’re here together and Aziraphale won’t ever again deny that this is the only place he wants to be.

“So you were at my place,” Crowley continues, “and I was at yours. Fitting, really. Surprised it didn’t work.”

“Did you see — were you anywhere, while I was—?”

Crowley shakes his head. “Just here, I guess.” He taps at his temple, right above the serpentine tattoo. “Reaching out for you. Looking. And nothing.”

“Odd,” Aziraphale says slowly. “I wasn’t anywhere else while — when you were in the shop. Didn’t feel a thing.”

“Too human,” says Crowley, and he leans back to flop himself dramatically into the corner of the couch: sharp points, not like Aziraphale’s prim right angles; Crowley is all jagged edges sinking into the plush leather. Oh, Aziraphale loves him like this: sprawled without a care, taking up just as much space on this human world as he needs: nothing so decorous as Heaven.

“Too — human?” Aziraphale blinks, considering it; he’d himself assumed that it would be their connection to humanity that made this possible, the way they’d bonded over and with this planet beneath and around them. “What else, then?”

“Must be our essences.” Crowley shrugs. “Gotta start somewhere a little less mortal, maybe.”

Aziraphale thinks on it. He would have been afraid of their essences meeting, once upon a time, but somehow as he’d lost his faith in Heaven’s bureaucracy, he’d somehow found some faith - whether from Her or not - that he and Crowley were something new, unable to hurt each other. 

“Well, we might as well try,” Aziraphale tells Crowley. “I also suggest…”

He reaches out his hands, palms up. It’s a bit of a risk, he thinks, but he’s filled with this human-like urge to protect, to touch, to feel; and it’s only a few seconds before Crowley extends his own hands, wraps them around Aziraphale’s.

“Right, _essencesss_ ,” Crowley says, just barely a hiss.

Aziraphale closes his eyes and thinks of himself: the call, beneath his breastbone and that funny human heart, that doesn’t just tie him to Heaven but calls his true, angelic, echoing Name. He starts to unravel it, slowly; his corporation has only been through this a number of times, and he has no desire to accidentally hurt either Crowley or himself, but he sort of… tips to the side, a step to the left, and his angelic senses are ringing in his ears like bells.

Oh, and _there’s_ Crowley: he can sense the familiar demonic essence unfurling, curling around itself. Crowley’s essence is a dark, tarnished gold, wound with black and a brighter thread of copper throughout; it’s dappled, like stream water beneath trees, and Aziraphale would know it like the back of his hand. He reaches out.

———

_He’s back at the damn bookshop. At least this time he’s outside; Crowley glances around, sees nothing moving or breathing, and wonders._

_He takes a single step towards the shop and the doors fly open and let out—_

_—light, Aziraphale’s light, silver-bright and gold-specked, as brilliantly sharp as that blue the sky gets on a chill winter day. Crowley stumbles a bit; it doesn’t hurt, it never has, but it’s startling nonetheless._

_He hastily takes the step back as the lights retreats, seeming to gather itself, and then — blows out through the roof of the shop, a beam of silver and cool gold glimmering to the skies, the colors of winter, the colors of crystal. The beam splits itself over and over and arranges itself like rays about the bookshop, points of brightness telling the hours of a clock, and Crowley has to take another step back. He’s in no danger, but it’s just so damn bright._

_There’s another moment where nothing changes and Crowley can feel the ground shaking beneath his feet. This isn’t it; this is too much, this is Aziraphale-as-angel, this is a Heavenly Host: this is his Principality writ across the sky. It’s too much: too-much, unEarthly and howling with it. Love is a fierce force (Crowley would know; Crowley would know.) It will burn: burn his own heart away, leaving nothing but the silhouette of someone who never really mattered, but Aziraphale doesn’t understand what he’s like when he’s unleashed, how the force of his powerful grace could strike fire into the earth itself…_

_Crowley realizes he’s very gently, very carefully, shaking in his skin. It isn’t fear, but it’s an awe he has no words for. This is Aziraphale, angel-bright, a gleaming upright sword sheathed in the stonegrace of the bookshop: his essence as Principality is tied here, and Crowley feels - feather-light, too-thin, as the brightness just grows and spreads in tendrils like filigree, and —_

_Crowley watches as his angel’s light spreads like spotlights, reflecting off of what can only be a dome of Aziraphale’s power, sky-blue and pale grey like storm-clouds, catching sunlight and spinning it into a million rainbows—_

_———_

_He’s out in the stars. Hadn’t quite expected to open his eyes and see — nebulae, of some sort, bright white specks peppered across the darkness of space like a connect-the-dots game. It’s swirling in front of him - red, gold, deep-blue, bronze - and Aziraphale wonders whether this is one that Crowley made. Or is he at Alpha Centauri? He should have studied—_

_There’s movement, and motion, and Aziraphale turns._

_What he sees first is a number of - rings, perhaps? - thin wheels, all spinning about and rotating round a center at entirely unchoreographed intervals; it leaves the image of a sphere, on the backs of Aziraphale’s eyelids, but—_

_—the center is a teeming mess of bronze and black, writhing around itself like chains, and Aziraphale knows what a black hole is, in fact. In its center is the smallest and brightest speck Aziraphale has ever seen, a tiny diamond burning hot and white, refracting the not-darkness as it feeds on itself again, and again, and again._

_Aziraphale watches, entranced, as Crowley’s essence continually generates light only to curl back in on itself: Ouroboros. And isn’t Crowley the beginning of that: the snake that swallows its own tail, twists upon itself, gnawing and being gnawed for all eternity: that spark of light generates as it dies, and Aziraphale shudders deep inside himself to have seen it, here in the outer reaches of someone else’s galaxy..._

_Red and copper intertwine like Crowley’s curls and then the wheels and rings all have wings, that overlap and intertwine like the nebulae behind Crowley, and Aziraphale thinks: this is too far, too distant; this is not of Earth. This Crowley would swallow space and make it a diamond; this Crowley is made of watchgears and concentric stacks of delicately-lined spheres, and Aziraphale thinks, idly, that he’ll run out of breath soon—_

_———_

—and then they’re both back in the bookshop, breathing heavily, their hands clutching at each other.

Crowley breathes in, tells his stupid corporation a second time to cut this shit _out._ There’s a thin sheen of sweat across Aziraphale’s brow, and Crowley wants to take care of it, so he does; demonic black silken handkerchief miracling itself into his fingers, because he does have an aesthetic, and he’s certainly not losing _that_ when he’s possibly about to die.

Crowley blots at Aziraphale’s forehead, gently, and Aziraphale’s eyes open, blazing-blue, to look at him thankfully; there’s a brief jolt as he’s reminded of Aziraphale’s power, scraping the sky — and then it’s just his angel, blue tempered with that grey-green of the sea, and Crowley sighs.

“I did _not_ like that one, angel.”

To his surprise, Aziraphale sighs and shuts his eyes again, leaning forward, and Crowley adjusts himself with a snake-like move so that he catches Aziraphale’s forehead against his breast, in the divot between his shoulder and chest.

Aziraphale breathes into his shirt for long enough that Crowley decides to - risk - he brings a hand up to tentatively cup at the back of Aziraphale’s head, and as he does Aziraphale makes this incredibly grateful sound and sinks farther into Crowley. Bemused, Crowley lets his fingers card through Aziraphale’s curls. Some small snakepart of him is shrieking at even getting this, finally being able to hold—

—his hands come around Aziraphale before his brain has taken any kind of control over his corporation, and, oh. Sometimes these human bodies do that, don’t they? Pick up on some underlying, unannounced urge and simply act it out? Crowley spends a single hour-long second being entirely embarrassed at his own stupid self until Aziraphale makes another one of those welcoming sounds and - burrows - into his shoulder. His own arms come round Crowley’s waist and Crowley legitimately has to wonder whether this is how they die, finally wrapped round each other. He allows himself to lean his cheek against Aziraphale’s hair and this, _this_ , this is his angel: this is more Aziraphale than he’s felt in any of their attempts thus far.

“We’re missing something,” he murmurs into his angel’s curls, but his arms tighten - again, stupid human bodies and their comforting impulses - and he just holds Aziraphale until both of their human lungs can calm themselves.

———

 _Why can’t I find you,_ Crowley thinks. _I can always find you. I can always feel you. Here, on Earth, on our planet of seven billion humans and six thousand years: those are the dimensions, axis x and y, the z axis the way my heart tugs towards you in languages I have no names for, and—_

 _Why can’t I find you,_ he thinks.

———

Aziraphale wants to stay here forever: there’s comfort here, the scent and warmth of Crowley, and he feels closer to his demon now than he has during any of their - attempts - and oh, he didn’t think this was going to be so _bloody_ hard, but if it were easy someone would have done it before—

—would they? Aziraphale assumes that he and Crowley are — different. He knows Gabriel occasionally has to meet with Beelzebub over business without smiting her - that’s just the way these things go something - and he’s heard rumors about Michael, but: has there ever been, in the history of the Almighty’s chosen planet (in the history of the Almighty…?), an angel and demon who have spent these six thousand years getting to _know_ one another? Becoming _friends?_ Becoming — whatever he and Crowley are, words humans maybe haven’t invented yet, with their short intense lives and their burning souls. He does not think it has ever been attempted.

He also does not think they will fail.

Faith blossoms in his heart again: not that generic silver-slick Heavenly feel but something more earthly, weighted with gold and dirt and branches to be something realistic. He and Crowley shall not fail. It just won’t be allowed.

(He does not want to think they can.)

Aziraphale doesn’t want to pull away from Crowley, so he doesn’t. But he says, turning his mouth the slightest bit away from the fabric of Crowley’s shirt: “We’ve tried an earthly meeting, and we’ve tried an ethereal one. What’s our next step?”

He can feel the snort, deep in Crowley’s chest. “Occult, angel, don’t insult me.” There’s a pause, and Aziraphale feels Crowley’s fingers twitch gently against his hair; he isn’t quite sure how to encourage it, but he tries to lean in further, and Crowley somehow gets the message. 

“Look,” his demon begins. “I feel like maybe it’s — we’re inbetween,” and something in his voice sounds so cautious. “It isn’t about our human places, cause we aren’t human, but it isn’t all about our - essences - either, because we’re…” Crowley swallows and Aziraphale feels that too, the way it echoes beneath Crowley’s breastbone. “We’re tied to this place, now.”

Aziraphale, belatedly, recognizes reluctance. And it makes sense: they’ve had only minutes, really, to recover from whatever conversation they’d had before; and a couple things click into place before Aziraphale says, somewhat into Crowley’s shirt again: “Yes. Our own side, dearest.”

He can feel the shudder Crowley gives back, but the ethereal plane upon which his true self resides only senses a slowly growing sense of wonder, so he stays still.

“We need a place,” Crowley continues after a moment, “where we’re our celestial selves and our human selves at the same time.”

Aziraphale hums against Crowley’s breast. He doesn’t want to move; he doesn’t want to fail again. They will _not_ fail. He feels like he’s careening between extremes like some sort of human rubber ball, full of energy that isn’t entirely his.

“What if we — pick somewhere,” Crowley says, and now Aziraphale hears embarrassment, which is so absolutely endearing he can barely stand it. “Let’s pick a place that’s, y’know, somewhere we both go, and see if we can, uh, meet.”

Aziraphale does sit up at that, watching the blush chase itself over Crowley’s face as the demon looks away. “That’s brilliant,” he says, probably overly encouraging, but he has to believe something’s going to work. “Where shall we go?”

Crowley shrugs, and the flush deepens as they untangle their arms. “Dunno. Kinda thought the bookshop would work.”

“The Ritz,” Aziraphale says with enthusiasm. Oh, he has plenty of memories there with Crowley, very recent, and all of them slicked with happiness like gold. “Even _you_ like it there.”

“It’s not bad,” Crowley murmurs, deferring, but this time he reaches his hands out to hold Aziraphale’s first.

———

_All he can see is — glitter, sparkling, lights reflecting off of a thousand mirrors; too many colors, all too bright, blinding._

_There are angles refracted everywhere and a waiter approaches, tray jauntily tipped, and smiles with far too many sharp-white teeth. He stumbles back._

_There’s someone calling his name from the other side of the room, but it - there’s a band playing, loud, brass and off-key, and - someone laughs, high-pitched and horrible, and a glass shatters._

_He feels tight, as if it’s taking all of his strength to hold himself in human-form; the voice calling is slightly human and slightly — other; a hint of sunlight, a hint of smoke. The rainbow; the obscuring cloud. The room is foggy, as well, but bright angles continue to jut out in ways that stab at the eyes, beat at the ears with a bat._

_“Where are you?”_

_Unfortunately, the noise causes a bunch of the brightly-colored shapes to turn towards him. They are not — human-shaped? Their limbs sit at angles; their forms slender and round at unusual proportions. They have something like faces, blurred-raw and shuddering, and now he’s surrounded. Is this — Heaven? Hell?_

_The faces are melting, and the eyes are nothing but gaping holes that see into the outer realms of space._

_There’s a pop like champagne and then all of the mirrors start shattering, one by one, tiny splinters peppering his face as the glass breaks over and over and—_

_———_

“Fuck!” Crowley yells, launching himself off of the couch and across the room to lean up against the wall; he desperately needs the hard press of it up against his spine, to stop thinking about — hands, all of those clutching greedy hands, fingers with _teeth,_ spiraling like a crystal, shattering like a broken prism.

Aziraphale has his face buried in his hands, and Crowley can watch his shoulders shudder as his angel breathes into his palms. “ _Fuck,”_ Crowley repeats. “What the _fuck_ was that.”

“At least we were both there,” says Aziraphale, muffled and mumbled, “but oh, heavens, the _screaming…”_

Crowley feels like someone has tied hundred-kilo weights to each of his human muscle groups. He’s exhausted, he’s nearly at rock bottom, he’s so tired and he just wants to curl up somewhere and let his poor heart ache its way to sleep.

Aziraphale rubs his hands over his face and, finally, looks up; to Crowley’s surprise, his eyes are red, as if he’s about to cry. It somehow makes Crowley more angry — not at Aziraphale, necessarily, but at their circumstances, at the way they’ve come all this way and he finally has Aziraphale on his side and they’re just going to fucking lose _anyway._

“I didn’t think it would be this hard,” Aziraphale whispers, and Crowley can hear the potential of tears in his voice.

“Of course it is,” he snaps. “Bloody ineffable plan. Bloody reality. Bloody stupid witches!” He kicks his coffee table as he does this, even though it hurts his toes. Fuck. “Nothing on this planet is ever easy, angel.”

“We are,” Aziraphale says, soft and mournful. “We always have been.”

“Where the bloody hell have you been?” Crowley gapes at him. “This?” His hand spasms wildly between the two of them. “This has been _nothing_ like easy!”

Aziraphale’s face falls, and it looks like Crowley’s crushing his soul. “It has _always_ been easy to get along with you, my dear.”

Crowley scoffs. “Two fucking minutes ago, angel, you finally admit we’re on the same side, and that just erases _six thousand years_ of—”

He stops. Aziraphale’s face is shattered, as broken as all of those mirrors, and Crowley immediately says, “Sorry, angel. That’s not what I…”

Aziraphale says, slowly, “But you’re right. I’m so — so fond of you, dearest, and I forget how horrible I’ve been.”

“God — Sata— _Somebody, fuck,_ fuckity _fucksss in a fuck choir,”_ Crowley hisses. _He can’t do this right now._ He can’t spend more energy he doesn’t have arguing with Aziraphale about their - friendship - their _whatever._ His heart is pounding and aching and doing all sorts of too-human things and it’s a distraction, it’s making all of his stupid human corporation buzz with anxious energy.

“I should,” Aziraphale begins, and Crowley spins around to look at him. 

“It’s not important now,” Crowley tells him, not wanting this road - again - when they’ve already used up so much of their evening getting nowhere safe. “It isn’t… it isn’t going to help us survive. We can do this later. Are you — are we sure we’re right?”

It takes a long time for Aziraphale to answer. The silence is irking, but Crowley waits, still leaning up against the wall, arms folded. 

“We have to be,” his angel whispers. “I can’t think of anything else that would work.”

“We can run,” Crowley says, and his heart pulls tight into his chest as he says it. 

Aziraphale shakes his head. “The prophecy, Crowley.”

“The _fucking_ prophecy,” Crowley sneers, because underneath all of this he’s starting to get scared - _again,_ whispers the voice in his head, _as usual_ \- that this may not actually work. That after all of this, he may actually lose Aziraphale.

He can’t.

———

 _Why can’t you find me,_ Aziraphale thinks. _So many millennia and you’ve always found me. You’ve brought me laughter and safety and trinkets and love (oh, Crowley, I know) and I’m standing here with my doors wide open and beacons lit. I know I have no chance of catching_ you, _you slick thing: you quickmoving firework, you fire-flashed snake. I know I have no chance of snatching you up, catching you in my arms - not the way you move, darling - so instead I’m holding them open, and calling with every atom in my body._

 _Why can’t you find me,_ he thinks, _I’m right here._

———

“There has to be a solution,” Aziraphale says, fully aware he’s mostly talking to himself. 

Crowley has retreated — back to the kitchen, where he’s banging around something that sounds like pots and pans but might simply be his head on the door of the refrigerator. Aziraphale knows this is his fault; it isn’t time to unpack all of the damage done over their lives, and he’s bandaging his own wounds in haste, and this isn’t going to be at all as easy as he’d thought.

Because he’d thought: He loves Crowley, and certainly Crowley must be fond of him, and absolutely they’d be capable of just exchanging… shapes. Corporations. Essences. He was looking so forward to just slipping himself through and into Crowley’s shape, to prove that they _could,_ and then maybe Crowley could have a nap and Aziraphale could… sit beside him, perhaps, keep him safe.

After all, they’ve both been discorporated before: Crowley only once, round the fourteenth century, after which he sulked and slept for a few decades and swore it would never happen again; Aziraphale thrice now, once back in 3045 BC when he’d been accidentally poisoned in Egypt, and then that time in the 600s that they don’t talk about — plus the time he’d been restored by the Antichrist. Aziraphale had assumed that slipping into a different corporation would be — much like that, really, simply sliding one’s essence into the empty vessel provided to you. Apparently it’s different when the vessel is ...occupied? Your immortal enemy? Your closest friend?

 _Here’s Crowley,_ Aziraphale thinks. He has no words for how much he ...admires Crowley, really, because he’s so rarely allowed himself to think about it. If they can make it through this, if they can really find that - period of grace, of peace, for the two of them to simply _be_ themselves - oh, Heaven, how he wants that. 

He’s terrified. He knows Crowley is as well; after so many years he can read nearly every expression on that familiar face: the twist to the mouth, the arch of the brow, the added insouciance to deflect. 

Aziraphale wants to pray—

Not the way he might to send a message; not the way he might to reach out for contact: Aziraphale wants to _pray,_ to Her, no circles or rituals, no strings attached. He wants to pray the way humans do, where all it takes is the folding of hands and the bowing of heads. He wants, so badly, so trust in Her love above all of it; to bypass Heaven and all that it isn’t, all the things he no longer has faith in, but to reach out to Her:

—and he’s scared to.

If he’s lost all of his faith - except this lingering bit, burning white-hot behind his breastbone; the faith he has in Crowley and in himself and in their path - shouldn’t he be Falling right about now? Is that why this isn’t working; Aziraphale’s ethereal essence is in the process of a long slow dive off of the rooftop of Heaven’s skyscraper? Fine, sure, maybe Crowley’s right in that the Archangels can’t do it alone, but She can. (He isn’t necessarily sure how Crowley knows, but he’s gotten the picture over the millennia that original Crowley was a much more functional angel than Aziraphale has ever been.)

His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s taken his stand at Crowley’s side and he’ll never regret that choice, but he’s afraid: bone-deep, heart’s-ache afraid because he doesn’t know what to do. Aziraphale will take nothing back, but: he doesn’t know how to _move forward._ He doesn’t know where to go.

———

Crowley is exhausted. 

His angel finds him in the kitchen, bent over the island, his forehead pressed into the cool marble. He’d just needed a moment with his eyes closed, just a few seconds, just a handful of breaths… 

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale.

Crowley can hear in his angel’s voice that he’s no closer to figuring this out than Crowley is; and Crowley isn’t sure he can continue throwing what’s left of his sapped strength into these horrifying scenarios and have anything remaining to protect them whenever they come—

“You need rest,” Aziraphale says.

“Yeah,” Crowley growls, pushing himself upright only to catch his head in his hands, elbows still on the counter. “I could sleep for a decade. And while we’re at it, I need a magic Archangel-killing wand, four more buckets of Holy Water, and the Bentley back.”

Aziraphale’s mouth twitches in fondness. “I can only manage one of those,” he says carefully. “Why don’t you come have a lie-down on the couch?”

“If I intended to sleep, angel, I do have a bed.”

Aziraphale’s eyes follow as Crowley shoves himself away from the counter. “Would you rather rest there?”

“I’m not going to rest at all,” Crowley spits. “Probably couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. Can’t afford it until we figure out what to do. Don’t want to be alone,” and that last bit falls from his lips like words from an Oracle, things he hadn’t intended to say: truths his foulmouth doesn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t be saying. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, taking a tentative step closer. “I’d come with you.”

He knows Aziraphale means for a fucking nap but Crowley’s brain takes it and runs, all of the usual fuckin chains and padlocks and weights and goddamn spreader-bar bondage gear he usually uses to keep his stupid fucking imagination in check having simply _fucked off_ in the event of this much more personal Apocalypse. 

“Let’sss run, angel.” He steps forward, finds the boldness to grasp at Aziraphale’s hands. He can feel himself unraveling just in the slightest: his eyes are likely all-yellow and wide; his tongue is likely forked. “Come with me. Buy usss some time.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, squeezing his hands, and there’s something else hissing into the air;

———

_—this is a Grey Place, notable only in its unnoticeable existence, and Crowley’s already unwound too far for his own liking as_

_Aziraphale straightens, tries to tug at his waistcoat, straighten his bow tie, but his hands are shaking and don’t exist, and he glances up at_

_Crowley knows how he seems here, all tangles of snake-like limbs, scales streaking down his spine as it winds round his ankle because this isn’t the_

_Aziraphale tries to open his mouth, but a choir sounds from his throat and he feels his wings, three-six-eighteen, grow from the crown of his head into a halo that’s_

_Crowley’s in circles infinity and loops; he_

_Aziraphale swallows, as best he can in a form with nothing gravity holding spaces broken stoned hung and gone. He reaches a hand-wing-light out to Crowley, because maybe they_

_Crowley takes a step back; he won’t touch Aziraphale like this, with this shadeform, this stoneweight darkness, he doesn’t dare to—_

_———_

For a while they just sit by each other on the couch and drink.

“Fuck it,” Crowley says finally, tilting his head back to toss the last of the wine down the long chasm of his throat. He’s always wondered, personally, the existential mechanisms by which he and Aziraphale are able to get absolutely splastered. Neither one of them uses the corporation for any sort of excretion process, and yet they can certainly consume. His tired, fuck-exhausted brain considers bringing out the good old angelic face and rolling up to Heaven with a couple of his questions: may as well try to get answers, since he surely isn’t going to exist a few days from now. _Oh Heavenly Almighty, etc etc, can you share with me the way you programmed these corporations to never have to have a piss while we’re getting hammered? This body has had three bottles of wine by now, and I’m not working a conscious miracle. Oh, we’re amusing? You like watching while we’re drunk? Well, watch this, my All-Holy Lady._

Aziraphale turns to look at him and the motion of his head is dragging against the air like a tyre skidding along asphalt, the speed like a snail working its way through molasses. “My dear?”

The words drop into the stillness between them. Crowley has never told Aziraphale how he takes every single one of these moments, picks them up, dusts them off and tucks them away into an old folio in the back of his brain. 

“Can’t get any worse,” Crowley tells him. “C’mon, angel. Let’s rest. An hour or two, tops.”

Aziraphale blinks - Crowley can see he wants to say he doesn’t sleep - but he’s not up to asking right into Aziraphale’s face, so he’s going to bluff his way through this like he always tries to. He stands, and holds out a hand, and Aziraphale very gently takes it and stands to follow.

Crowley leads them down the hall to his bedroom. His bed is a super kingsize, obviously, with four posts extending up towards the cathedral ceiling before ending in an onslaught of wrought iron vines and branches that join together overhead like a low ceiling. Amongst their intertwining arms Crowley has spent hours weaving set upon set of fairy-lights, set to appear random, so that he can spread out on his back with limbs akimbo and look into another sky he created — but he won’t light them, now, not with his angel here. Instead he snaps his fingers and the gratuitous layers of sheet and blankets and comforter all peel back, decadent and dark, and the pillows sort themselves out between two sides hopefully. He’s wearing his normal pyjamas, black silk with embroidered cuffs, and when he glances over to Aziraphale he realizes that he _of course_ has put the angel in a set of tartans, the plaid containing both Aziraphale’s pale blues and golds crossed with Crowley’s own black and red. He tells the flush to fuck right off of his face and hopes Aziraphale just doesn’t notice.

“No, you don’t have to sleep,” Crowley says, not meeting Aziraphale’s eyes as he clambers into the bed on his normal side. “I probably won’t sleep. But if I don’t get to close my eyes and stop thinking for a bit, I’m likely to start Armageddon on my own.”

“Oh, too soon,” Aziraphale murmurs with the barest hint of humor, and Crowley notices he’s holding his arm out, admiring the flannel pyjama shirt. 

“I just,” Crowley starts, and he rolls over so that his back is to Aziraphale as he says, “ _please_ don’t go too far,” the latter all bursting from his lips like a single mangled word, and he immediately buries his face into a pillow with his eyes shut and lets his body drop into stillness.

Drop — it’s like a _plunge_ into deep, deep water, sinking like a concrete block, and he thinks he whimpers into the pillow but isn’t entirely sure.

He can feel Aziraphale’s gentle humor as his angel climbs into the bed, properly fluffing all of the pillows until they’re the proper arrangement to support him as he sits in the bed. His legs tuck themselves beneath the covers, and Crowley can feel the sharp candleflame-heat of a miracle as Aziraphale summons what can only be a book.

Crowley pulls in a deep breath. If they end up having to go this way, to be fair, he won’t really regret it. Right next to his angel, in comfortable clothes, closing his eyes against a far-blossoming impact. Like the meteor the humans say took out the dinosaurs, but much smaller: a meteor for two, and the end of an age.

———

The thing is: Aziraphale talks to Crowley. 

He talks to Crowley when the shop is empty and he’s tidying. He talks to Crowley when he’s reading and needs to make a note of something or another. He talks to Crowley when complaining into the ether about customers, he talks to Crowley when he comes across something lovely, and he talks to Crowley late at night after one too many glasses of wine when he feels like the very air is crystallizing beneath some profound thing he can only put words to at that very instant.

It’s never mattered that Crowley isn’t always there. It’s the principle of the thing.

And that thing means Aziraphale doesn’t even really realize it until he’s absolutely mid-sentence, mid-conversation, with what seems like a Crowley so absorbed into exhaustion he might dissolve into his components if he gets any heavier:

“— and you know, my dear, I was never really able to, ahem, _summon_ The Nice And Accurate Prophecies Of Agnes Nutter, Witch, right?, and you can put that judgmental look _away,_ Crowley, I would never have stolen it, I just wanted to ...peruse, you know, and potentially make a copy — can you blame me? Would have served us right if I had, you know, very fine, but there’s always been some kind of layer of protection in the most powerful books of prophecy that keeps them out of the hands of, well, ethereal forces.” He swallows, and continues with only a moment’s pause once he realizes he’s just harmless-rambling, and Crowley hasn’t moved, which means he’s either asleep, too exhausted to care, or enjoying it. “I assume occult too, my dear, I’m certain it isn’t just my— Heaven that’s identified Agnes. Hell’s been after that book for forever, really, look at the Nazis!”

Crowley doesn’t move and it’s suddenly incredibly comforting: it’s like Aziraphale’s been wrapped in a warm blanket, hand-knit and thick, a Crowley who’s just… _there,_ here, so close Aziraphale could touch if he wanted to.

(He wants to; he’s always wanted to; he will always want to; and he may, really: the decision-making part of his own angelic entity of a brain is all mixed-up like a pudding.)

“Anyway, my dear, the human books of prophecy have always been distinctly… human. I’ve tried to get my hands on any remaining copies and, having failed, I assumed there weren’t any. Imagine my surprise to find it in the back seat of your car! Can you blame me, really, for being utterly distracted with it, for wanting to rush inside and surgically take it apart? I mean, of course you can, my dear fellow, seeing as I came to conclusions I didn’t share with you.”

It’s at this point that Aziraphale’s voice falters, and he glances over again at Crowley’s still form. There’s no reaction, but Aziraphale can’t stop his hand as it reaches out to brush very gently over Crowley’s hair, from the crown of his head down to his neck, only once. 

“Of course I’m sorry. If only I’d told you — but that was then, and this is now. We can discuss all of this later, my own, and I’ll beg for forgiveness as prettily as you might like, but for right now I’m more interested in keeping us intact to do so.” He breathes in. “You’re right, my dear, like you usually are. This we can manage later.”

There’s technically nothing from Crowley - no movement, no gesture, no sense of awareness, but Aziraphale can feel something starting to build in the room. It might be him, honestly; Crowley can sleep to regain his energy, but Aziraphale is a Principality and he doesn’t recharge by slipping away: he recharges by charging forward, by building a wall and planting his feet and making declarations. 

Aziraphale reopens the book, pages ahead towards the next section. It’s a tome he picked up a century or two ago, which was supposedly about how to read signs - dreams, prophecies, even themes occurring in one’s life - and Aziraphale had thought, it couldn’t hurt, while preparing himself mostly to curl around Crowley as he slept and allow his demon to rest somewhat.

And even now, he can’t stop talking to Crowley. “This volume says, believe it or not, that it’s up to the interpreter as to whether these things are symbols or not! Do you believe! If it’s up to us, Crowley, I’ll ...I’ll turn it into another _rain-bow_ situation and claim that the prophecy means the Holy Almighty Herself favors us, well, being here!”

His voice dissolves into the dark of the room, the maze of branches weaving above them, and Aziraphale’s hand is back in Crowley’s hair without even a conscious thought for it. 

“I hope you know,” Aziraphale says, voice cracking in his throat; “I hope you _know,_ my darling, that this isn’t where I intended to end up.” He pauses, and then: “Oh, no, that isn’t what I mean either! Blast,” and his fingers are combing through Crowley’s hair, starting at the bottom and running up over the back of Crowley’s skull until freed to do it again. “I always - hoped - we would end up on the same side. I did. I wanted it. I was afraid, yes, I was the _most_ terrible coward, but…” His throat contracts, and for long minutes there’s nothing but his knuckles carding through Crowley’s hair, and the sound of his worried breathing.

“I never wanted an end.” Aziraphale breathes it into the air, not wanting to see it. “I never did. I know now that it’s hard for you to believe, my love, but all things I’ve done since I met you were for your… protection.”

It’s a hard pill to swallow. Knowing that he’s let Crowley hang for so long in indecision; knowing now that Crowley has had no idea what has been hanging behind Aziraphale’s breast like the brightest lantern ever lit in the last six thousand years; knowing, now, that Crowley has taken every single mention of their differences, of Aziraphale’s alignment, as one more nail in the terrible coffin of their love: constructed from the Ark, nails from the Cross, the hammer a repeat of all the times Aziraphale has denied him: more than thrice, yes, more than Peter, Gabriel’s voice ringing in his ear and this urgent eclipse in his heart. It’s every second he feared Crowley would be swallowed in Holy Water or Hellfire both, because if Crowley stumbled _both_ sides would be against him, and Aziraphale does not think he would survive that himself.

“I never would have been able to bear that, dear boy,” he murmurs to the back of Crowley’s head. His hand smooths down Crowley’s skull and slides to his shoulder, where Aziraphale lets his palm rest. “I scarce know what to do now, what to say. I don’t deserve you, yet I’m going to fight with all I’ve got to keep you. Do you—”

His voice chokes in his throat, and Aziraphale’s aware of the first bit of sob that falls from his mouth, mainly because it’s been _charged_ with his essence and as it rolls from him in all three dimensions, expanding like domes, light starts twinkling above them. For a moment Aziraphale thinks it’s really his grace — until he realizes it’s just sets of lights, tiny twinkling lights, that Crowley’s entwined into the weave of wrought iron that arches above the bed. Aziraphale stares at its glimmer, and wants to cry. Crowley wove stars, knit galaxies, and here he is on this earth remaking his best work, a glittering curve above their heads that makes Aziraphale choke with the strength of his love.

———

Crowley doesn’t, necessarily, sleep: but he leaves consciousness all the same. It’s too easy, with his angel beside him and his every hope bound up in the sixteen inches between them, to simply let his head rest, and breathe. He can feel Aziraphale at his back, gleaming like a shield and sword, and Crowley lets himself sink into it: that gentled feeling Aziraphale projects, the calm of love and grace he can’t entirely hold within his corporation, the bright bits that leak out. He’s never done this before - Aziraphale’s never stayed this close - but now Crowley feels his own body sinking into the mattress and he _allows_ it. He can _feel_ the tangleknot of his brain slowly loosening, and that slick tension in his muscles starts to fade.

He drifts, for a while. There are words in his ears, something like Aziraphale’s voice, but it’s almost like radio static by the time it reaches him; all he knows is the tone of his angel’s voice, and he sinks in deeper. It really is like he’s a body, he’s a ship, except that the sea is a comfort drawing him deeper and deeper and Crowley thinks that maybe this is why so many sailors drown: they feel this, the urge to be safely buried under this pressure, and they dive instead.

But Crowley isn’t — he won’t let himself sleep, entirely. The eons of his body are begging for it - even for a demon who _hadn’t_ gotten used to sleep, a human corporation can really only go so far before it needs some kind of rest - but he doesn’t dare entirely slip under, not when angels or demons could broach his door, banging their fists, demanding both of them — wait, why, _why are they here,_ where Hastur knows his address, where Heaven could easily find his stupid human title, why are they not somewhere safe, somewhere fleeing, why are they—

—Crowley jerks himself awake, only to find Aziraphale’s fingers moving slowly through his hair, dragging against his scalp from the base of his skull up and over until they tingle gently against his forehead.

“—and I don’t really think that _playing with fyre_ intends to be any kind of euphemism, although, oh, dear, I hadn’t really thought about - not that I’m against it, let’s be fair, my dear, if you haven’t figured it out at this point, I’m strongly in — Crowley,” and the entire timbre of his voice changes. “Are you awake?”

“Dreamed we were in a cave,” Crowley manages to say, his voice entirely slurred and nearly lacking anything but his own sibilant hiss. “You’d yer wings on - ov’r me. Dunno, angel. We dead?”

“Goodness, Crowley, no!” Aziraphale’s fingers pause for a moment, and then - to Crowley’s eternal surprise - his angel continues with the motion, a single encompassing sweep, from under up through his hair to the peak, then starting again. Crowley will never, ever, love Aziraphale more than he does in this moment, keeping his hand on Crowley’s head, the simple touch more grounding and more invigorating than the angel can ever, ever know.

“Sorry,” Aziraphale says eventually, and it wants to be awkward except that here - in the slipped midnight of Crowley’s bedroom - every word is sacred and cherished.

“D’n be, angel,” Crowley says. He hasn’t moved a muscle, mainly because he really doesn’t want to bother with any of that. “Whassup?”

He feels Aziraphale sigh; hears a motion as if Aziraphale lets his head tip backwards onto the stack of pillows. “Obviously I haven’t been able to check all my resources,” his angel begins, stuffy and fond, “but I’ve checked what I think are the most pertinent ones, and no one offers any kind of response better than, _what you believe will be true._ Preposterous, I say.”

Crowley’s still waking, still letting his extremities come back from that vague limbo he enters when resting, and so his brain isn’t entirely online when he says, “Angel, is it?” It’s just words coming out of his mouth at this point. 

“Well, of course.” Aziraphale sounds almost affronted. “If you and I could control the direction of history, my darling, we might have done so hundreds - thousands - of years ago, yes? There’s no such thing as a self-determining prophecy, and I’m—”

“Angel,” Crowley says, in a voice that stops everything. He pulls himself together - all of the far-ranging atoms of his real-self come back, coalescing themselves into order within the form Crowley knows best, and Crowley rolls over. Aziraphale withdraws his hand but only an inch, and they look at each other over the angel’s palm, open and empty in the space between.

There’s something here that floats between them. It’s been in a lot of the words Aziraphale has said in the meantime - endearments, breaths, gasps he hasn’t meant to utter - as well as the achings Crowley’s heart has been pulsing out: needing, wanting, yearning, protecting. Crowley stares into Aziraphale’s eyes. They’re amazing eyes, somewhat like storm clouds over the sea; Crowley has seen them in green, and grey, and blue, and all combinations between: a choreograph of colors, tuned to the weather. Whereby as goes the world, so go the angel’s eyes.

Crowley slowly - so slowly - brings himself to sit up. He’s remembering something. He notices as he does that the tartan pyjamas Aziraphale wears have only become more complex in pattern, something similar to but unlike paisley blooming across his chest, and he doesn’t want to look down at his own. He does, however, reach out to take both of Aziraphale’s hands. These, at least, are his: these hands have been given him to hold, earlier, and he will not let them go until his own being peels away from these bones.

There’s something pressing at the edges of himself, and Crowley grasps Aziraphale’s fingers and closes his eyes. It’s like something he dreamed, perhaps, the kind of image that doesn’t exist in this human-world, this reality, until perhaps an angel and a demon create it.

“Saw it, angel,” Crowley slurs, letting his eyes open. “Th’s place — hey. ‘S my stars.” They’re all alight, every single strand of tiny fairy lights he’d woven in amongst the wrought-iron tangle of a garden above his bed. “Y’likem?”

“Oh, my dear.” Aziraphale’s face turns up to look at them, and Crowley watches his profile, lit with the twinkling gold-white light of his canopy. “You create such beautiful things.”

“M’not,” Crowley mumbles, ducking away from it, because he’s still a demon, but Aziraphale turns back to him. 

“You do, and you always have,” his angel breathes. “And it’s - it’s more than - oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale sighs, and something deep and dark seeps out of him as he does. “Angel, demon — everything you touch ends up lovely.” His gaze drifts, distracted and a little distraught. “Mine just end up ...strong, but yours. Acts of decadence, my heart.”

Crowley shakes his head, because there’s still something pressing at the edge of his temples. “Angel,” he starts. “‘Ziraphale. Had a dream.”

“Tell me,” says Aziraphale, and his hands reaches out to comb through Crowley’s hair once again. 

“Wasn’t just,” Crowley starts, and then temporarily pulls his hands deeply down his face and then clutches them through his hair, trying to wake up without losing what he thought. “Was dreaming. You were… talking. ‘N somethin’ made…” Now his hands darts out, back, tentative. “Angel,” says Crowley. “You trust me?”

“Always,” Aziraphale breathes, those ocean-storm eyes wide and aware, and the sense of other eyes bristling open just beyond their consciousness.

“Lemme see, then,” Crowley tells him, and - hoping he hasn’t lost the thread of what he thought he had - pulls Aziraphale under.

———

_Aziraphale waits, in the darkness, until something starts to settle._

_Crowley’s memories of Eden filter down around him, slowly; he can feel the sleep-steep of Crowley’s brain, and beneath it that rolling drumbeat that marks Crowley’s beautiful, angelic-demonic imagination, a thing that’s always been uniquely his. Clover spreads under Aziraphale’s feet. Grasses and moss appear beyond it, throwing themselves out over the gentle hills like clumsy puppies. There are lilies to his left and poppies to his right, and he’s standing in the vague shadows of the orchard. He’s beneath a peach tree, himself; now Aziraphale glances around, looking for Crowley._

_He can feel Eden settling around them both as his own memories kick in; Aziraphale wasn’t necessarily as tuned to the Earthly bits, but he can remember the flickers of sun through leaves, the shadows wheat creates as it sways. A tree solidifies as both of their memories align: and then another: and then another. Between Aziraphale’s grand impressions and Crowley’s mind for detail, the two of them repopulate the green of Eden, together. The transparent pieces lock together and fit, and it’s like a human puzzle being solved, piece by piece, the overlap between their perceptions._

_Aziraphale lets himself meander through the moss and the thicket and the berry bushes, all bearing ripe fruit gleaming at him like nothing else, and he isn’t surprised when the Garden begins to slope upwards and he glances up the hill to see the Tree, with a silhouetted figure standing beneath it._

_Crowley has always been beautiful in Aziraphale’s eyes, even from that first day. How could he not be? Aziraphale is a being of love. The Almighty set no rule other than to admire and worship Her work, and Aziraphale has always been appreciative — but Crowley’s form, here, the way his cheekbones cut and that long delicious rustfire hair curls over his shoulders, the quirk to his lips and the joy in his eyes - joy, a demon; his demon - Crowley here is Fallen, yes, but he is as yet uncut by the realities of the human world. There has been no Inquisition here, no World Wars; Eden is a Crowley defined only by potential, and the breath of that potential spans farther than a rainbow and Aziraphale’s breath is suddenly fast in his chest._

_And his demon - his, yes - reaches out, and Crowley takes his hand with the same wild fascination in his eyes as the very first time they spoke. Aziraphale looks at him. He’s fairly sure his own face bears the same appreciation he had for a friendly face, for someone who spoke_ to _him, not_ at _him, and six thousand years of Aziraphale’s love and fear blends together as the landscape solidifies around them._

“See,” he can hear Crowley’s voice saying from afar, “you were talking in my sleep, and in this dream, it…”

_Crowley pulls him under the tree, then reaches up to pluck an apple from the branches and holds it out to Aziraphale._

_Oh, but it makes sense. There’s no knowledge on how to do this, because no one has tried before — but they are here by the Grace of God and Agnes Nutter, and there’s really only a very small step required when one is in search of wisdom, of knowledge, of Good and Evil._

_Aziraphale accepts it in his left hand, and with his right he reaches up to twist a good-looking apple off of another branch. He hands it to Crowley._

_The apples are not — Eve’s were perfect-red, round and shining, the ideal concept of a sweet crisp temptation. These are just, well, apples. Aziraphale’s is mostly red but mottles to pink at the stem and the root; Crowley’s is a bold red that fades to green on one side. There’s a brown spot on his, and a dent in Crowley’s. This isn’t Temptation into anything except the reality of life on this plane: this knowledge is for them but it’s also human, earthly, and utterly **real.**_

_Crowley lifts his fruit up to his perfect white teeth, and Aziraphale can’t help the cosmically joyful grin as he echoes Crowley’s movements. There’s a moment where they both stare into each others’ eyes, stripped bare and besotted and ridiculous, and then they both simultaneously let their eyelids flutter shut as they bite into the tart-sweet flesh and chew to swallow._

_———_

Crowley opens his eyes.

Everything is off-balance; his essence feels drowsy, broad, uncentered, and his sense of Aziraphale is simultaneously pinging hard and _incredibly dulled,_ and there’s some kind of ache about his bones that he can’t translate at the moment because he’s too worried about —

— he turns his head and —

— Crowley looks into his own face. 

But it isn’t.

“Oh,” says Aziraphale from within his body, and _fuck_ but it’s confusing as all Heaven to hear his voice making Aziraphale’s tiny sounds of surprise. “Oh!”

Crowley brings his - _his_ \- hands up, and they’re Aziraphale’s: good, sturdy hands, golden ring set round his pinky, declaring his Principality to anyone who might see. The body feels: solid. Stable. For Crowley, who has spent six thousand years zooming around within his own corporation, going far too fast for anyone and everyone — Aziraphale is a structure, brick walls within which Crowley’s essence can settle, and slow, and stop.

“My dear,” says Aziraphale with his throat again, and Crowley tries - and fails - to make this corporation hiss like his own essence is. He ends up coughing, wildly, and smacks at Aziraphale who’s laughing and trying to help.

“You can’t,” he manages to say, and while he feels hoarse and overwrought it’s _his angel’s voice_ saying these things, and Crowley may be overjoyed at their success but somehow it’s entirely too _raw_ at the moment. He swallows. “Don’t say these things in my voice.”

“Oi, angel,” Aziraphale says instead, his diction a perfect imitation, and Crowley feels—

The corporation warms up, straightaway, zero to one hundred faster than the Bentley, and it’s - hot, thick, overwhelming, laced with so much affection that Crowley wonders if he’s been this obvious the entire time and if so where’s the nearest basin of holy water he can drown his own shame into - and yet it’s lovely, decadent, the foundation of Aziraphale absolutely ringing with it like a stand of bells, and Crowley feels these hands fist themselves at the rush of heat and pleasure rolling through him.

By the time his eyes are opened again, he’s looking at his own face, and the expression is a very familiar regret.

“I should have figured that would happen,” says Aziraphale-with-his-voice, and suddenly all of this is too much for Crowley to comprehend at a time that he’s literally inside his angel’s body and they’ve far too much work to do for this. 

“Angel,” he says, and then kind-of chokes on it as Aziraphale’s-his face quirks with a fond smile, and it’s stupid and weird but he’s also laughing at it. “We’re here to save our own skins, right, not get all weird over each other about this.” _Not yet, anyway,_ Crowley thinks within the safe space of Aziraphale’s flesh, and the thought echoes oddly, as if this corporation is used to some other set of feelings.

“Of course, my darling,” says Aziraphale with his mouth, and Crowley wants to laugh but the corporation wants to shudder, all tender-burning and fond, and Crowley is completely taken aback at the resulting combination of responses. Aziraphale’s watching him, and once Crowley manages to refocus his eyes, the angel-as-him says, quietly, “We might consider some practice.”

This is true; a good point and a meaningful one besides. It isn’t as if Crowley’s going to, well, _ignore_ all of these shimmering responses he’s feeling in this corporation, because they’re faint scraps of Aziraphale and Satan knows he’s desperate for anything at this point, but: they do need to focus. Now that they’ve obtained the knowledge - now that they know how to switch - their first priority, top of the triage list, is survival. That’s to figure out first, the messy details of all of these human-and-more feelings a second that they’ll have eternity to unravel if they can make it past the burning gates.

“Right, angel,” Crowley says in Aziraphale’s voice, and based on the way his current corporation twitches and he _sees_ his own corporation stutter, _that’s_ a thing to be further investigated in the future. For the moment, he leans back into the couch, spreading the Aziraphale-corporation’s legs in a way he’s _sure_ they’ve never been spread and picking up on a good deal of complicated responses he can review later, after they aren’t dead. “Show me your best saunter, love.”

**Author's Note:**

> I will rise now 
> 
> and go about the city 
> 
> in the streets
> 
> broad ways I seek 
> 
> him whom my soul loveth
> 
> \------
> 
> at this point it should be obvious that this is the "nothing is easy" version of that night, told in three (+1) pieces. I'll beg for comments, I'm not shy. Come yell at me on [tumblr!](https://sevdrag.tumblr.com/)


End file.
